To misuse a bit of prose from Charles Dickens, it was
neither the best of times nor the worst of times, but I know very few people
who will object when, a few hours from now, 2014 gets dragged off to the glue
factory. This has not been a good year
for most people in the United States. By all accounts, this year’s holiday
season was an economic flop of considerable scale—the US media, which normally
treats cheery corporate press releases with the same enforced credulity that Pravda
used to give to pronouncements from the Politburo in the Soviet era, has had to
admit that Black Friday sales were down hard this year, even counting the
internet—and plenty of Americans outside the echo chambers of the media have
very good reasons to worry about what 2015 will bring.
Mind you, cheerleading
of a distinctly Pravda-esque variety can still be heard from
those pundits and politicians who are still convinced that people
can be talked into ignoring their own experience if they can only be
force-fed enough spin-doctored malarkey. That sort of enthusiasm for the
glorious capitalist banker’s paradise has plenty of company just now; I’m
thinking in particular of the steady drumbeat of articles and essays in the US
mass media wondering aloud why so many Americans haven’t noticed the economic
recovery of the last four years, and are still behaving as though there’s a
recession on.
Of course there’s an explanation for that awkward fact,
which is that the recovery in question never happened—outside, that is, of the
abstract otherworld of numerical jugglery and spin doctoring that passes for
official economic statistics these days. For most Americans, the last four
years have been a bleak era of soaring expenses, shrinking incomes and
benefits, rising economic insecurity, and increasingly frequent and bitter
struggles with dysfunctional institutions that no longer bother even to pretend
to serve the public good. That’s the reality people in the United States face
when they get out of bed each morning, but it’s not a reality that’s welcome in
the American mass media, so endless ingenuity has been expended in explaining
why so many people in the US these days haven’t noticed the alleged economic
recovery that’s allegedly burgeoning all around them.
I expect to see a good deal more of this sort of twaddle in
the weeks immediately ahead, as those mass media pundits who haven’t yet
trotted out their predictions for the new year get around to that annual task.
For that matter, it’s doubtless safe to assume that out here on the fringes
where archdruids lurk, there will be plenty of predictions of a different kind
or, rather, several different kinds. There will be another round of claims that
this is the year when the global economy will seize up suddenly and leave us
all to starve in the dark; there will be another round of claims that this is
the year when this or that or the other hot new technology will come swooping
in to save the day and let the middle classes maintain their privileged
lifestyles; there will be—well, those of my readers who have been following the
blogosphere for any length of time can fill in the blanks themselves.
I’ve noted in previous years just how many of these latter
predictions get rehashed every single January in the serene conviction that
nobody will notice how often they’ve flopped before. Popular though that habit
may be, it seems counterproductive to me, since—at least in theory—predictions
of the sort we’re discussing is intended to be something more than light
entertainment. With this in mind, I’d like to engage in the annual ritual of
glancing back over the predictions I posted here at
the beginning of the year now ending, and see how well I did. Here’s what I
said:
“My prediction for 2014, in turn, is that we’ll see more of
the same: another year, that is, of
uneven but continued downward movement along the same arc of decline and fall,
while official statistics here in the United States will be doctored even more
extravagantly than before to manufacture a paper image of prosperity. The
number of Americans trying to survive without a job will continue to increase,
the effective standard of living for most of the population will continue to
decline, and what used to count as the framework of ordinary life in this
country will go on unraveling a thread at a time. Even so, the dollar, the
Euro, the stock market, and the Super Bowl will still be functioning as 2015
begins; there will still be gas in the gas pumps and food on grocery store
shelves, though fewer people will be able to afford to buy either one.
“The fracking bubble has more than lived up to last year’s
expectations, filling the mass media with vast amounts of meretricious
handwaving about the coming era of abundance:
the same talk, for all practical purposes, that surrounded the equally
delusional claims made for the housing bubble, the tech bubble, and so on all
the way back to the Dutch tulip bubble of 1637. That rhetoric will prove just
as dishonest as its predecessors, and the supposed new era of prosperity will
come tumbling back down to earth once the bubble pops, taking a good chunk of
the American economy with it. Will that happen in 2014? That’s almost
impossible to know in advance. Timing the collapse of a bubble is one of the
trickiest jobs in economic life; no less a mind than Isaac Newton’s was caught
flatfooted by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, and the current
bubble is far more opaque. My guess is that the collapse will come toward the
end of 2014, but it could have another year or so to run first.
“It’s probably a safe bet that weather-related disasters
will continue to increase in number and severity. If we get a whopper on the
scale of Katrina or Sandy, watch the Federal response; it’s certain to fall
short of meeting the needs of the survivors and their communities, but the
degree to which it falls short will be a useful measure of just how brittle and
weak the national government has become. One of these years—just possibly this
year, far more likely later on—that weakness is going to become one of the
crucial political facts of our time, and responses to major domestic disasters
are among the few good measures we’ll have of how close we are to the
inevitable crisis.
“Meanwhile, what won’t happen is at least as important as
what will. Despite plenty of enthusiastic pronouncements and no shortage of
infomercials disguised as meaningful journalism, there will be no grand breakthroughs
on the energy front. Liquid fuels—that is to say, petroleum plus anything else
that can be thrown into a gas tank—will keep on being produced at something
close to 2013’s rates, though the fraction of the total supply that comes from
expensive alternative fuels with lower net energy and higher production costs
will continue to rise, tightening a noose around the neck of every other kind
of economic activity. Renewables will remain as dependent on government
subsidies as they’ve been all along, nuclear power will remain dead in the
water, fusion will remain a pipe dream, and more exotic items such as algal
biodiesel will continue to soak up their quotas of investment dollars before
going belly up in the usual way. Once the fracking bubble starts losing air,
expect something else to be scooped up hurriedly by the media and waved around
to buttress the claim that peak oil won’t happen, doesn’t matter, and so on;
any of my readers who happen to guess correctly what that will be, and manage
their investments accordingly, may just make a great deal of money.
“Sudden world-ending catastrophes will also be in short
supply in 2014, though talk about them will be anything but...Both the
grandiose breakthroughs that never happen and the equally gaudy catastrophes
that never happen will thus continue to fill their current role as excuses not
to think about, much less do anything about, what’s actually happening around
us right now—the long ragged decline and fall of industrial civilization that
I’ve called the Long Descent. Given the popularity of both these evasive moves,
we can safely assume that one more thing won’t happen in 2014: any meaningful collective response to the
rising spiral of crises that’s shredding our societies and our future. As
before, anything useful that’s going to happen will be the work of individuals,
families, and community groups, using the resources on hand to cope with local
conditions.”
As I write these words, the US media is still parroting the
fantasy of a fracking-driven “Saudi America” with a mindless repetitiveness
that puts broken records to shame, and so the next shiny distraction disguised
as a marvelous new energy breakthrough hasn’t yet been trotted out for the
usual round of carefully choreographed oohs and aahs. Other than that, once
again, I think it’s fair to say I called it. Continuing economic decline,
check; a fracking bubble heading toward a world-class bust, check;
climate-related disasters on the rise, with government interventions doing less
and less to help those affected, check; and a continuing shortage of
game-changing breakthroughs, world-ending catastrophes, and meaningful
collective responses to the crisis of our age, check-check-check. If this were
a bingo game, I’d be walking up to the front of the room with a big smile on my
face.
Now of course a case could be made that I’m cheating. After
all, it doesn’t take any particular insight to point out that continuing trends
tend to continue, or to choose trends that are pretty clearly ongoing and
predict that they’ll keep on going for another year. While this is true, it’s
also part of the point I’ve been trying to make here for getting on for nine
years now: in the real world, by and
large, history is what happened when you weren’t looking. Under some circumstances,
sudden jarring discontinuities can hit societies like a cold wet mackerel
across the face, but close attention to the decade or so before things changed
routinely shows that the discontinuity itself was the product of
long-established trends, and could have been anticipated if anyone was willing
to do so.
That’s a particularly relevant issue just now, because the
sort of long-established trends that can lead to sudden jarring discontinuities
have been more and more evident in the United States in recent years, and one
of the things that made 2014 so wretched for everyone outside the narrowing
circle of the privileged well-to-do is precisely that several of those trends
seem to be moving toward a flashpoint. I’d like to sketch out a couple of examples,
because my predictions for 2015 will center on them.
The first and most obvious is the headlong collapse of the
fracking bubble, which I discussed at some length in
a post earlier this month. For most of the last decade, Wall Street
has been using the fracking industry in all the same ways it used the real
estate industry in the runup to the 2008 crash, churning out what we still
laughably call “securities” on the back of a rapidly inflating speculative
bubble. As the slumping price of oil kicks the props out from under the
fracking boom, the vast majority of that paper—the junk bonds issued by
fracking-industry firms, the securitized loans those same firms used to make up
for the fact that they lost money every single quarter, the chopped and
packaged shale leases, the volumetric production agreements, and all the rest
of it—will revert to its actual value, which in most cases approximates pretty
closely to zero.
It’s important in this context to remember that those highly
insecure securities haven’t been cooped up in the financial equivalent of the
dog pound where they belong; quite the contrary, they’ve gone roaming all over
the neighborhood, leaving an assortment of messes behind. Banks, investment
firms, pension funds, university endowments, and many other institutions in the
US and abroad snapped this stuff up in gargantuan amounts, because it offered
something like what used to count as a normal rate of return on investment. As
a result, as the fracking boom goes belly up, it’s not just firms in the
fracking industry that will be joining it in that undignified position. In the
real estate bust, a great many businesses and institutions that seemingly had
nothing to do with real estate found themselves in deep financial trouble; in
the fracking bust, we can count on the same thing happening—and a great deal of
the resulting bankruptcies, defaults, and assorted financial chaos will likely
hit in 2015.
Thus one of the entertainments 2015 has in store for us is a
thumping economic crisis here in the US, and in every other country that
depends on our economy for its bread and butter. The scale of the crash depends
on how many people bet how much of their financial future on the fantasy of an
endless frack-propelled boom, but my guess is it’ll be somewhere around the
scale of the 2008 real estate bust.
It probably has to be said that this doesn’t work out to the
kind of fast-crash fantasy that sees the global economy grind to a sudden stop
in a matter of weeks, leaving supermarket shelves bare and so on. The events of
the 2008 crash proved, if there was ever any doubt on that score, that the
governments of the world are willing to do whatever it takes to keep economic
activity going, and if bailing out their pals in the big banks is what’s
needed, hey, that’s all in a day’s work. Now of course bailing out the big
banks won’t stop the bankruptcies, the layoffs, the steep cuts to pensions, the
slashing of local and state government services, and the rest of it, any more
than the same thing did in the wake of the 2008 crisis, but it does guarantee
that the perfect storms and worst case scenarios beloved of a certain category
of collapsitarian thinkers will remain imaginative fictions.
Something else that’s baked into the baby new year’s
birthday cake at this point is a rising spiral of political unrest here in the
United States. The mass protests over the extrajudicial executions of nonwhite
Americans by police were pretty much inevitable, as pressures on the American
underclass have been building toward an explosion for decades now. There’s a certain bleak amusement to be had
from watching financially comfortable white Americans come up with reasons to
insist that this can’t possibly be the case, or for that matter, from hearing
them contrive ways to evade the awkward fact that American police seem to have
much less difficulty subduing belligerent suspects in nonlethal ways when the
skins of the suspects in question are white.
Behind the killings and the protests, though, lies an
explosive tangle that nobody on either side of the picket lines seems willing
to address. Morale in many police departments across the United States
resembles nothing so much as morale among American enlisted men in Vietnam in
the last years of US involvement; after decades of budget cuts, grandstanding
politicians, bungled reforms, an imploding criminal justice system, and ongoing
blowback from misguided economic and social policies, a great many police
officers feel that they’re caught between an enemy they can’t defeat and a
political leadership that’s more than willing to throw them to the wolves for
personal advantage. That the “enemy” they think they’re fighting is
indistinguishable from the people they’re supposed to be protecting just adds
to the list of troubling parallels.
In Vietnam, collapsing morale led to war crimes, “fragging”
of officers by their own men, and worried reports to the Pentagon warning of
the possibility of armed mutinies among US troops. We haven’t yet gotten to the fragging stage
this time, though the response of New York police to Mayor De Blasio suggests
that we’re closer to that than most people think. The routine extrajudicial execution of
nonwhite suspects—there
are scores if not hundreds of such executions a year—is the My Lai of
our era, one of the few warnings that gets through the Five O’Clock Follies of
the media to let the rest of us know that the guys on the front lines are
cracking under the strain.
The final bitter irony here is that the federal government
has been busily worsening the situation by encouraging the militarization of
police departments across the United States, to the extent of equipping them
with armored personnel carriers and other pieces of hardware that don’t have
any possible use in ordinary policing. This is one of a good many data points
that has me convinced that the US government is frantically gearing up to fight
a major domestic insurgency. What’s more, they’re almost certainly going to get
one. For decades now, since the post-Soviet “color revolutions,” the US has
been funding and directing mass movements and rebellions against governments we
don’t like, with Syria and Ukraine the two most recent beneficiaries of that
strategy. We’ve made a lot of enemies in the process; it’s a safe bet that some
of those enemies are eager to give us a heaping dose of our own medicine, and
there are certainly nations with the means, motive, and opportunity to do just
that.
Will an American insurgency funded by one or more hostile
foreign powers get under way in 2015? I don’t think so, though I’m prepared to
be wrong. More likely, I think, is another year of rising tensions, political
gridlock, scattered gunfire, and rhetoric heated to the point of incandescence,
while the various players in the game get into position for actual
conflict: the sort of thing the United
States last saw in the second half of the 1850s, as sectional tensions built
toward the bloody opening rounds of the Civil War. One sign to watch for is the first outbreaks
of organized violence—not just the shooting of one individual by another, but
paramilitary assaults by armed groups—equivalent, more or less, to the fighting
in “bleeding Kansas” that did so much to help make the Civil War inevitable.
Another thing to watch for, along the same lines, are
glorifications of revolutionary violence on the part of people who haven’t
previously taken that plunge. To some extent, that’s already happening. I’m
thinking here especially of a
recent essay by Rebecca Solnit, which starts off with lavish praise
of the French Revolution: “It’s popular to say that the experiment failed,” she
says, “but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to
an absolutist monarchy”—a statement that will surprise anyone who’s heard of
Napoleon, Louis XVII, or Napoleon III. In holding up the French Revolution as a
model for today’s radicals, Ms. Solnit also doesn’t happen to mention the
Terror, the tyranny of the Directorate, the Napoleonic wars, or any of the other
problematic outcomes of the uprising in question. That sort of selective
historical memory is common in times like these, and has played a very large
role in setting the stage for some of history’s most brutal tragedies.
Meanwhile, back behind these foreground events, the broader
trends this blog has been tracking since its outset are moving relentlessly on
their own trajectories. The world’s finite supplies of petroleum, along with
most other resources on which industrial civilization depends for survival, are
depleting further with each day that passes; the ecological consequences of
treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer for the output of our tailpipes and
smokestacks, along with all the other frankly brainless ways our civilization
maltreats the biosphere that sustains us all, builds apace; caught between
these two jaws of a tightening vise, industrial civilization has entered the
rising spiral of crisis about which so many environmental scientists tried to
warn the world back in the 1970s, and only a very small minority of people out
on the fringes of our collective discourse has shown the least willingness to
recognize the mess we’re in and start changing their own lives in response: the
foundation, it bears repeating, of any constructive response to the crisis of
our era.
